Free Shades of Simon Gray by Joyce McDonald

lab.” She looked over at Kyle. “I thought Mr. McCabe was going to handle this himself.”
    “That’s what he wanted to do,” Kyle said. “Schroder’s the one who wanted to get the police involved. It looks like she got her way.”
    Danny was fighting hard to keep his thoughts straight. Images of him standing in a courtroom, of the look on his parents’ faces, of being locked up in some six-by-eight cell with no windows, had him rattled and near panic. He couldn’t get the grim pictures out of his head. None of this was supposed to be happening. He had just gotten accepted by Dartmouth. He had plans. He had potential. Damn it, he had
a future
. And spending it behind bars was not part of the plan.
    Kyle was going on about how the school administrators might have brought some computer consultants in over the weekend, maybe even the local police, although he didn’t think they had a computer crimes division. Danny was barely listening. He was imagining the police at his own front door, his father standing there in his black T-shirt and black pants—clothes he still wore at his print shop, even though he had long since converted his businessfrom letterpress to laser printing—scratching his head. A dark figure growing even darker as he listened to what the police had to say.
    “Simon wouldn’t let anything happen,” he told Kyle. “He’s too smart. You said he’d cover his tracks, and I’m pretty sure he did.”
    “Maybe the police are smarter,” Devin said. She had her hand on Kyle’s wrist and her grip was growing tighter by the minute. “They have their own computer experts.”
    “On the state level,” Kyle said, loosening her fingers. “And maybe in a few of the counties, but I doubt our local force has that kind of setup.” He got to his feet and began to pace. Although every window in the house was open, he was sweating. His T-shirt clung to him like a damp dish towel. “If anyone comes around asking questions, none of us knows anything.”
    “What if they come to us with evidence?” Danny said.
    “Deny it,” Kyle told him. “Deny everything. You know nothing about anything. You have no idea who or why anyone would break into the school’s computer system.”
    “But if they have evidence?” Danny insisted.
    “It will point to Simon. And right now he’s not talking.”

I F S IMON G RAY HAD NOT BEEN TRAPPED INSIDE THE dark envelope that was his mind, he might have felt the cool hospital sheets beneath him, heard the wheezing of the respirator, seen the different colored lines on the cardiac monitor undulating across the screen, felt his father’s callused hand on the side of his face, and smelled his familiar scent—the chemical odor that clung to his clothes from the pharmaceutical plant where he worked. If Simon had not been in a coma, he would have told his father that this was not how he’d expected things to turn out. Not even close.
    He would tell him how the strangest things had been happening. How he could sit on the side of Stanley Isaacson’s bed without the nurses shooing him back to hisroom. How he could wander the halls of the hospital unseen. And how, at this very moment, he was shocked right down to his bare toes to find himself at home, in his own bedroom.
    He wasn’t at all sure how he’d gotten there, but he now understood it wasn’t necessary to physically leave the hospital to go from one place to another. Each time, there was only the whooshing sound, the icy damp gray, and a few moments of disorientation before he realized he was no longer in his body. He also knew he wasn’t in control of his destinations. Or at least he didn’t seem to be.
    He touched his face, ran his fingers across his eyes, as he had done the few other times he had found himself outside his body, and discovered, as on those occasions, that he wasn’t wearing his glasses. Simon found this astonishing. For the first time in years, he could see everything clearly without glasses. Every